China’s recent actions have forced the Quad alliance between Australia, India, Japan and the US to become much more formal

The Quad is the latest politico-military alliance on the block that has been under discussion over years but is picking up pace now. So far, India, one of the primary members of this alliance along with US, Japan and now Australia, seemed to be quite happy that it remained stillborn, not wanting to instigate the reason this axis was being built up for —  to contain the People’s Republic of China and its President Xi Jinping in the region. Then India faced a double whammy; first the pandemic imported from China, advance information of which was withheld by Xi and his lackeys, and then the murderous assault on our troops and territorial ingress in the Galwan Valley. This forced the Indian political and bureaucratic establishment to realise that China is not even a transactional neighbour but an avaricious maximalist and having financially and militarily backed Pakistan for decades now, it now wanted Central Asia on its terms and saw India as a thorn in its flesh. Besides with India swerving towards the US-led West, the Chinese establishment thought that “teaching a lesson” would force us away from Quad. But with the meeting of Foreign Ministers and military officials in Tokyo, the Quad, an alliance to protect the Indo-Pacific, is closer than ever to being formalised.

It remains to be seen if the Quad, or whatever name the alliance takes, will have something similar to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) whereby if war is declared on one NATO member, all members are at war (although NATO doesn’t know how to resolve conflicts between two members as is currently ongoing between Greece and Turkey). But China’s recent belligerence despite gifting the world the pandemic that has ripped the global economy to shreds, driven millions into poverty and destabilised the global system means that the Quad is not just sending a message to Xi and other Chinese Communist Party members. It is also telling the rest of the world that four large and successful democracies are willing to stand up to Beijing’s bullying and that other nations  can take shelter behind them. India is slowly warming up to Australia with which it conducted a two-day mega joint exercise in the Indian Ocean Region recently, involving a range of complex naval manoeuvres, anti-aircraft drills and helicopter operations. This is progress considering that India has so far not invited Australia to the Malabar exercises as it feels that the latter’s dependence on the Chinese economy would hold it back from committing to Quad effectively. But now that Australia, too, has spearheaded the campaign to unveil the conspiracy behind the Wuhan virus and is at the receiving end of Chinese hitback at its economy, there is a shared concern. India has to map out a strategy of opening doors of cooperation in relation to its Andaman and Nicobar Islands with Australia. At the end of the day, China just has a sea or two. India is the only nation in the world to have an Ocean named after it and that ocean should belong to us as a sphere of influence and used to squeeze China along maritime corridors.